Japan's Unit 731 core to open to public

HARBIN, July 7 (Xinhua) -- The core area of the site of Japan's notorious Unit 731 in northeast China's Harbin will be opened to the public in 2015, a source with the Museum of Evidence of War Crimes by Japanese Army Unit 731 said on Monday.

The area, which consists of a bacteria lab and a prison used to keep people for biological experiments, is going through a clearing process that will be finished by October, according to Jin Chengmin, the museum's curator.

The lab and the prison are direct evidence of the army unit's biological and chemical warfare, according to Jin.

"We will try to open it to the public around the 70th anniversary of victory in the Anti-Japanese War," he said.

Unit 731 was a top-secret research base established in Harbin in 1935 as the nerve center of Japan's biological warfare in China and Southeast Asia during World War II.

More than 10,000 people were killed there. Civilians and prisoners of war from China, the Soviet Union, the Korean Peninsula and Mongolia perished at the hands of Japanese scientists.

The retreating Japanese invaders blew up the base when the Soviet Union army took Harbin in 1945.